Neither accessibility nor markup quality should be sacrificed to make tricky designs easier to achieve.

This book is ideal for a beginner to gain practical skills involved in using CSS to make attractive web sites. A basic knowledge of HTML is required to fully implement the examples / exercises mentioned in the book.

The book is divided into 7 chapters with a progressively exposure to new techniques and implementation of skills acquired in previous exercies.

Chapter 1 of this book deals with the headings. The chapter has been crafted by Cameron Adams and he discusses about various techniques used for the headings to make them beautiful and stand out from the crowd. Ranging from image replacement techniques to more sophisticated Flash replacements, all is written in a semantic way while retaining page’s accessibility across all browsers.

Chapter 2 of this book has been written by interactive designer, Jina Bolton.

Images are the windows to your web page’s soul.

As quoted from the chapter, images have a great visual appeal on the users. The chapter covers the various image techniques used to structure attractive photo albums, inline images, introductory images by applying variations of colors, borders, padding and margins. You’ll also discover effective ways to style those all-important captions.

Chapter 3 of the book deals with Backgrounds. It has been already established that CSS has significantly affected the way we use web page backgrounds, so a deep dive into it makes good sense. David Johnson looks at various CSS background properties in an example to make stunning web designs that are supported on all modern web browsers. It also touches to some CSS3 properties in it.

Chapter 4 deals with an important issue as far as the usability of the site is concerned. Guess what? Navigation, of course. Steve Smith of http://www.orderedlist.com makes his efforts to discuss the successful navigation through a case study. It covers horizontal, vertical and tabbed navigation menus and the markup used to make them beautiful and usable.

Chapter 5 of the book discusses forms, an important part of user interaction. In  this chapter Cameron Adams discusses the way we can make forms more usable and accessible. From effective labelling to grouping, layout and styling of the form elements, all is covered in this chapter in Cameron Adams way.

Chapter 6 deals with Rounded corners. A pretty design aid to make your pages beautiful. Rounded corners have made an important place in the design world, mostly after gmail made its greater use. Steve Smiths discusses various ways by which the rounded corners effect can be achieved both in fixed and elastic designs.

The last chapter of the book deals with Tables. Jonathan Snook of http://www.snook.ca discusses the ideology behind tables in post CSS era. CSS position property for table will now be supported in IE8 making it universal across major browsers. It will be of high use to the designers to create their multi-column designs without use of floats.

Overall the book is good and the language used is simple. The concepts and techniques are pretty much understandable using the examples in a beautiful way.